November 19, 1988
Red and green indicator lights from the appliances watch m pay bills online in my black coffee living room somewhere around 6 a.m. as the dawn creeps around the edges of the closed curtains on the patio window.
Toggling back and forth between the web bill pay screen and the calculator on my dashboard, my eyes fixate on the calendar date 19 in a font size of at least 300.
Quickly I type into the calculator 2011 - 1988 to see how many years have passed...23; and it dawns on me, all I really needed to do was remember how old my son is and subtract a year.
My son was a year old when my father died of pancreatic cancer 23 years ago on this day in 1988.
I wasn't close to my father; at least not emotionally but then my father wasn't the kind of man you could get close to emotionally. In retrospect, we are a lot alike. A friend of mine told me once I am a hard nut to crack. That was my dad. He was a nut; always clowning, cracking bad jokes, telling tall tales, never revealing who he really was. Guarded.
If I'm right about him and I being a lot alike then I can tell you this about him.
If like me, people thought him unemotional, distant, cold and hard-hearted, then let me tell you, he was just the opposite. That hard exterior was a shield, like a tortoise shell, protecting the soft body inside.
He couldn't trust just anyone with his emotions. He had to protect himself because he felt deeply, so deeply it was almost painful, so painful it was nearly impossible to share because the emotions were so tender should someone belittle, ridicule, or invalidate them, they melted like ice on hot steel and scarred his heart, scarred it so severely he protected it as if his life depended on it, because it did. People, like my dad, who care so much, care too much...they call it hyper-sensitive, are incapable of letting themselves care like normal people, because the emotions are so strong, the pain so intense, it crushes them. So to cope, they protect, they guard, they avoid, and they appear...hard.
If he was like me, that probably happened to my dad more than once in his life, and it probably started a very young age, so that by the time I came into his life in his early 30's, his pattern of protection was set.
I wonder if he ever opened up to my mother? I can't ask her now. She's gone too. I was close to her, but still guarded, but that's a different story.
Over the years, when I think of my dad, I think of all the things he taught me and I'm grateful. It was through his teaching, not his words, that he showed me he loved me. He taught me to fish, hunt, camp and not be afraid to work on a car, though changing tires and a battery are about all I can do; but by golly, I wasn't afraid to dig in and try to change the radiator hose on my daughter's car a couple of years ago, and damned if I didn't do it! I can thank Dad for that bit of bravado.
Dad was good with his hands. He wasn't formally educated beyond the 3rd grade but he was by no means. uninformed. He read the newspaper every day, so he was far more aware of current events and politics than I was or am...we are dissimilar in that fashion because I abhor the news. Daddy believed everything he read, I believe little to nothing I read or see on the news. He was far more trusting than I'll ever be.
Thanks to my dad, I'm a tough girl. Put me on a camp site and I can do almost anything a man can do and depending on the man, more.
You know those emails that go around asking you if you had the chance to talk to anyone in history, who would it be?
Well, if I had the chance, I'd want to talk to my dad. I'd like to get to know him, the real him.
I have a feeling he was a complicated, interesting person. I'd like to think we're similar in that fashion as well.
I loved my dad. I love the memories of him. They're all good. How many people can say that about a person in their past? It's not a bad legacy to leave behind, if you ask me.
Toggling back and forth between the web bill pay screen and the calculator on my dashboard, my eyes fixate on the calendar date 19 in a font size of at least 300.
Quickly I type into the calculator 2011 - 1988 to see how many years have passed...23; and it dawns on me, all I really needed to do was remember how old my son is and subtract a year.
My son was a year old when my father died of pancreatic cancer 23 years ago on this day in 1988.
I wasn't close to my father; at least not emotionally but then my father wasn't the kind of man you could get close to emotionally. In retrospect, we are a lot alike. A friend of mine told me once I am a hard nut to crack. That was my dad. He was a nut; always clowning, cracking bad jokes, telling tall tales, never revealing who he really was. Guarded.
If I'm right about him and I being a lot alike then I can tell you this about him.
If like me, people thought him unemotional, distant, cold and hard-hearted, then let me tell you, he was just the opposite. That hard exterior was a shield, like a tortoise shell, protecting the soft body inside.
He couldn't trust just anyone with his emotions. He had to protect himself because he felt deeply, so deeply it was almost painful, so painful it was nearly impossible to share because the emotions were so tender should someone belittle, ridicule, or invalidate them, they melted like ice on hot steel and scarred his heart, scarred it so severely he protected it as if his life depended on it, because it did. People, like my dad, who care so much, care too much...they call it hyper-sensitive, are incapable of letting themselves care like normal people, because the emotions are so strong, the pain so intense, it crushes them. So to cope, they protect, they guard, they avoid, and they appear...hard.
If he was like me, that probably happened to my dad more than once in his life, and it probably started a very young age, so that by the time I came into his life in his early 30's, his pattern of protection was set.
I wonder if he ever opened up to my mother? I can't ask her now. She's gone too. I was close to her, but still guarded, but that's a different story.
Over the years, when I think of my dad, I think of all the things he taught me and I'm grateful. It was through his teaching, not his words, that he showed me he loved me. He taught me to fish, hunt, camp and not be afraid to work on a car, though changing tires and a battery are about all I can do; but by golly, I wasn't afraid to dig in and try to change the radiator hose on my daughter's car a couple of years ago, and damned if I didn't do it! I can thank Dad for that bit of bravado.
Dad was good with his hands. He wasn't formally educated beyond the 3rd grade but he was by no means. uninformed. He read the newspaper every day, so he was far more aware of current events and politics than I was or am...we are dissimilar in that fashion because I abhor the news. Daddy believed everything he read, I believe little to nothing I read or see on the news. He was far more trusting than I'll ever be.
Thanks to my dad, I'm a tough girl. Put me on a camp site and I can do almost anything a man can do and depending on the man, more.
You know those emails that go around asking you if you had the chance to talk to anyone in history, who would it be?
Well, if I had the chance, I'd want to talk to my dad. I'd like to get to know him, the real him.
I have a feeling he was a complicated, interesting person. I'd like to think we're similar in that fashion as well.
I loved my dad. I love the memories of him. They're all good. How many people can say that about a person in their past? It's not a bad legacy to leave behind, if you ask me.
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